


my darling, my sweetheart, i am in your sway

by chocolatelabraderp



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Asexual Henry, Asexual Relationship, Canon Compliant, F/M, Five Years Later, Fluff, Gen, M/M, Multi, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Post-Canon, Post-The Raven King, Road Trips, Soft Gansey, Solar Eclipse 2017, The Raven King Spoilers, asexual gansey, demisexual blue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-08
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-12-25 03:59:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12027654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chocolatelabraderp/pseuds/chocolatelabraderp
Summary: blue's not into celebrating her birthday, unless it coincides with a solar eclipse. five years later + road trip shenanigans + henrietta shenanigans + fluff + a lot of feelingstitle from "rise to me" by the decemberists.





	my darling, my sweetheart, i am in your sway

“It’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive to Friendsville from here,” Gansey observed over an enormous paper map spread out on the hood of the Pig. “Maybe we should watch from there.”

Henry, who was spread out on the roof of the car, head dropped over the windshield, eyes closed in deference to the oncoming eclipse, gave a delighted hoot of laughter.

“Is that not the area we already occupy all the time? Isn't Friendsville the name of our collective airspace?”

Blue, squished between Gansey and the car in a way that was decidedly not unpleasant, braced her hands on the orange of the hood, so warm and radiant in the Tennessee heat that she half-expected her palms to sink into it like the one of the shower jellies Orla kept in small, colorful pots in the shower she shared with Blue and Jimi and a litter of cousins. “Let’s move there and start a commune. A private one. The three of us and Adam and Ronan.”

Henry nodded, the movement slightly ghoulish with his face inverted. “Sounds good to me, Blue Planet.” He flung out an arm, eyes still pasted shut. “Tell me if I land anywhere near where we should be.”

Gansey shifted against her back as he leaned forward, and she felt his stomach squish against the small of her back. He brought his arm around her to meet Henry’s on the map, and she made a little noise halfway between _oh, hello_ , and _oh, that’s nice_. “You landed in Alabama.”

“That legendary sweet home,” said Henry, sweeping out his hand again. “How about now?”

“You’re in Kentucky,” said Blue. Gansey rested his chin on top of her head, and she felt him sigh against her shoulders.

“Anywhere jumping out at you, Jane?”

They’d planned their second (“non-annual,” Henry had said, “although there’s a thought, o nomadic ones”) post-graduation road trip around the solar eclipse that been considerate enough to time its appearance with Blue’s twenty-third birthday. She had been thrilled when she’d first seen the date on Maura’s calendar of significant celestial events over a year ago, and although she did not like much to-do for birthdays, particularly her own, she was prepared to make a once-in-a-lifetime exception to celebrate this collision.

She had patiently Sharpied the eclipse into the calendar in her dorm room, and decorated the little square with a rainbow of cloud shapes, sunbursts, and squiggles. She’d made herself a pinhole camera to view it through, although Gansey had insisted on purchasing pairs of eclipse glasses online for backup, just in case. Blue had bought a large jar of the most obnoxious glitter she could find at the arts and crafts store - the brand Noah had liked best, that stayed the longest on her fingernails when she mixed it with clear nail polish - and she and Henry had slathered it onto their glasses. She'd told him hers were in honor of Noah, that he would have been as thrilled as she was about the impending eclipse, and Henry had squeezed her hand and told her that his would be in Noah’s honor, too.

They had charted course from Gansey’s apartment in Beacon Hill, the low hum of the ley line familiar in her blood, the scent of the ocean rolling in through his open windows. Blue was fresh from Oregon, her brown skin suntanned and freckled, the clean, pure smell of its Douglas firs still buoyant in her chest, and Gansey had kissed every spare inch of her as if he had not heretofore known that freckles could appear anywhere on her body.

Gansey had taken a satisfied delight in lining up their departure dates five years to the day, and Blue had sat back on her heels, playing with the untied laces of one of her turquoise high-tops as she took him in. She thought he’d grown a little taller since that first road trip, and heavier, thanks to four years of cold Northeast winters full of comfort food and innumerable well-stocked care packages stamped from Manhattan and first Henrietta, then Portland once she'd transferred junior year. He’d remained somewhat muscular under the extra padding, thanks to Blue’s discovery of the Arnold Arboretum and Blue Hills Reservation on her second visit to Boston. To Blue’s great amusement, and possibly greater embarrassment, Gansey had also joined Harvard’s intramural inner tube water polo team, but having now borne witness to more inner tube water polo games than she ever thought she’d see, she wasn’t sure how much energy he really exerted playing the sport. As far as she could see, the real reward was watching Gansey float around shirtless and damp, laughing and earnestly doing his best to do whatever you did during water polo.

She'd worried, once they'd split up for college all those years ago, once they’d emerged from the chrysalis of the road trip and had gone out to make new lives for themselves, that his self-sacrificing streak would widen again, that with Glendower found, he’d fall back on trying to please other people instead of doing things because he wanted to do them. Maybe he’d drop the historical anthropology major he’d declared for political science or finance, or join the golf team, or get an internship at the State House, or whatever it was that rich white people did in Massachusetts, anyway, as he tried to squeeze back into that narrow role of Richard Campbell Gansey III, Golden Boy.

But once the semester had kicked off, Gansey had leapt headfirst into his anthropology classes, and joined the history club and the naturalist club and speech and debate and Harvard’s TEDx partnership and godforsaken intramural inner tube water polo, and he’d called Blue at least once a week, voice bright and brimming with eagerness. He’d tell her something interesting and Blue-ish that he’d learned in class or in naturalist club, and Blue had delighted in how earnest and nerdy and _Gansey_ he was allowing himself to be.

His soft thighs had strained at his khaki shorts as he sat cross-legged on the hardwood floor of his bedroom, squinting at his phone as he plugged route after route into Google Maps, magenta polo pulled snug. Blue had watched his lips move silently as he plucked another city off the map and typed it in, and reached over to rest her hand on his kneecap. He’d glanced up at her and smiled, his eyes bright and clear. He’d looked better-rested than he had in years, three weeks after Harvard’s graduation, his pulse alive, alive, alive beneath Blue’s fingers.

“Where do you want to watch it from?” he’d asked her, as Henry, who had Skyped in from Manhattan to help plan, hummed along to _Emotion Side B_ as he folded clothes on Gansey’s laptop screen. They’d planned to leave from Boston in two weeks’ time, stop to check out the family Gansey had read about online that performed miracles in Colorado, explore the national parks in Washington State, cut a path down to Texas because Blue and Henry wanted to visit Austin again, make a pit stop in Georgia to investigate that side of the ley line, and finally pull up to somewhere between Atlanta and Henrietta to catch the eclipse before heading home. Anywhere else that caught their eyes en route was fair game - although Gansey had dropped a hint the week before about hitting Baker, California, to see the world’s largest thermometer, and Blue was going to do her damnedest to keep him from making that stop.

She’d consulted the map laid out on the hardwood; each of them were sitting on an edge of it to keep it from curling in the humidity. “Somewhere in the totality.”

Gansey had pushed his wireframes up on his nose. “Obviously.”

“Somewhere that’s not going to be flooded with eclipse-watchers.” Henry had given her a skeptical glance over Skype, and she’d made a face at him. “That’s a thing! There are eclipse tourists. I don’t want to have to deal with them, I just want to lie out in a field with the two of you and let the void overtake me.”

“Fair enough,” Gansey had said, as Henry had made a sound of approval. “I think Tennessee will be the best spot if we want to make that our last stop. It’ll be a closer route back to Virginia.”

Blue had already begun googling the path of totality, minimizing Henry’s Skype window momentarily to check the results. She’d been imagining the field she’d like to lie in to watch the solar event since she’d marked it in her calendar, but she hadn’t been able to pinpoint a location that seemed like it might be able to deliver on that fantasy. “Let’s drive through,” she’d said at last. “We can choose last-minute, see what looks the least obnoxious with people.”

“And so Jane has spoken,” said Gansey, as Blue had tapped the keyboard and Henry’s face filled the laptop screen once again.

“And so it shall be,” Henry had intoned, and then he and Gansey had gotten off on a tangent about whether or not it was tacky to stop and visit a hot spring. Blue had paused to text Ronan a picture of Red Boiling Springs on the map with the caption _I didn’t know you had holdings in Tennessee!_ , and then she had tuned back in to Henry and Gansey, submerging herself in the glorious pool of both their voices at once.

Now, T-minus 5 hours until the eclipse, they plotted their course in a gas station parking lot in Nashville. The eclipse would be visible here for just under two minutes, but Blue had already decided that she didn’t want to watch it from here. She had seen enough ten-gallon hats in the forty minutes they’d been here, and, as a very small person already irked by clothing designed to make tall people even taller, she had made several silent vows that she would not take even the smallest chance that the eclipse she’d been waiting on would be blocked from her view by someone else’s ten-gallon hat.

“Jane?” Gansey prompted. “Keep going?”

She nodded. “Keep going. There’s too many people here already.”

“I figured,” said Gansey, and Henry added, “We’d look sick in cowboy boots, though. We have time to get some.”

“Do not,” Blue said, giving Henry the stink eye, then Gansey, “give him any ideas.”

“Which one of us?” Gansey asked, raising an eyebrow behind his wireframes.

“Yes,” said Blue.

She pointed to the thin strip of towns along the path of totality. “Henry, can you pull up that list of cities again?”

“I have to open my eyes for that.”

“You have five hours until that becomes dangerous, so pull it up fast.”

Henry slid his phone out of his pocket and got to looking, and Blue felt Gansey’s hand creep around her waist and find its way into the front pocket of her overall shorts. She tipped her face back to kiss him, the movement a groove in their record after five years of practice, and his lips caught her forehead, as they always did.

He tipped his head down so she could kiss the soft line of his jaw. “You and Henry want to pick out some snacks before we head out? That way we can drive straight through to … wherever.”

Blue obligingly raised her sunglasses as he moved to kiss her temple. “Sure thing.”

“Oho, Dick Three,” said Henry from the top of the Pig. “You know as well as we do that none of us are driving _straight_ anywhere.” He cleared his throat theatrically, then raised his phone above his face. “Adams,” he began. “Alcoa. Alexandria …”

Blue let him read until he pronounced the words _Crab Orchard_ , and then stopped him. “I’d like to watch my eclipse from Crab Orchard,” she said, bracing herself on an elbow against the hood so she could lean forward and tousle Henry’s spikes. “I can’t imagine that gets too much tourism.”

“Crab Orchard is the stone capital of Tennessee,” said Gansey conversationally, and both Blue and Henry turned to him with perfect imitations of the _oh really, Dad?_ expression Ronan reserved for Gansey Facts like these.

“What?” he said, shrugging. “It was in the guidebook.”

Henry shook his head affectionately. “I love you, Ganseyman.” He rolled off the roof of the Camaro with something a bit less than grace, then dusted himself off. “Did I hear one of you say snacks?”

Blue looped her arm through his as Gansey caught Henry’s other arm and planted a sloppy kiss on his cheek. “You did,” she said, “and I choose you as snack deputy. Gansey, will you find us a way to Crab Orchard?”

“So Jane has spoken,” he replied, dipping his head in agreement.

“And so it shall be,” said Henry, giving a decisive nod.

They browsed the gas station wares arm-in-arm. Between Blue’s kaleidoscope of hair clips, orange crop top, and true-blue overalls, and Henry’s cerulean-and-yellow striped tank top and snug white denim shorts, they were as garish as the snack packaging lining the shelves. Henry’s gold sneakers were so shiny that Blue was tempted to slide on her pink-and-green strawberry-shaped sunglasses whenever they caught the light, even indoors. Henry had bought a pair of sunglasses from the same flea market back in Austin, but his were shaped like pineapples. His fingernails, Blue’s fingernails, and Gansey’s were all painted the same rapidly-chipping shade of shockingly bright purple, which Blue had bought for ninety-nine cents in a drugstore in Nebraska.

“Any whims today, Blue Devil?” Henry asked, tilting his head until it bumped against hers.

She hummed her indecision and moved down the aisle of snack foods, chewing her lower lip. She’d become something of an expert at pulling together gas station meals over the course of their first road trip, and prided herself on being able to assemble a reasonably healthy spread if necessary. However, she'd already made the executive decision that as today was ostensibly a celebration, a healthy spread was _not_ necessary.

She and Henry spotted the rack of Moon Pies at the same time, and they each darted out a hand to grab a package before grinning at each other.

“I don’t know what these are,” Henry said, inspecting the package, “but I sense a theme. I’ll grab the Sun Chips, you grab a box of those - what are those called? Galactic Snacks, just for kicks.”

“ _What_?”

“You know,” he said, gesturing with the package of Moon Pies. “Galactic Snacks. Those like, chewy fudge bricks with the sprinkles.”

She whacked him with own package of Moon Pies, laughing. “You mean _Cosmic Brownies_ , you nerd.”

“You wound me,” said Henry, in a very good impression of offense. “I don’t appreciate that I wasn’t consulted before licensing that brand name. ‘Galactic Snacks’ has a much better ring to it. It’s got consonance _and_ assonance.”

Blue grabbed a six-pack off the shelf, laughing. “Come on. We have a finite amount of time to get to Crab Orchard before my eclipse hits, and _almost_ more importantly, we have to see if Gansey’s ever heard of Moon Pies.”

\--

“What is this?” Gansey asked from the backseat, holding a Moon Pie up to his face.

“They’re local,” said Blue, and cackled at the _you’re shitting me_ look Gansey shot her. “No, I mean it, they’re made in Chattanooga or something. Calla used to bring them back when she visited family around there.”

“Calla eats these?”

Blue nodded, kicking her legs up onto the dashboard. “We should probably stop and get her a pack.”

Gansey took a careful bite, and Henry glanced away from the road for a moment to watch. Gansey chewed carefully, a quizzical look on his face.

“Kind of like a stale s’more?” he said, casting a glance between the two of them. “Not bad, just … strange.”

 _Strange_ didn’t stop his hand from dipping into them until he’d finished both packages in the two hours it took to reach Crab Orchard. Plus half the bag of Sun Chips, which Henry and Blue both helped with, and all but one and a half of the Cosmic Brownies - Henry and Blue each took one for nostagia’s sake, but Blue only made it through half of hers before the sugar began to make her teeth ache, and she passed the rest along to Gansey. She caught his eye in the mirror of her sun visor, and he gave her a clumsy wink before fitting the entire half-brownie into his mouth.

They drove in circles for a while, Blue keeping her eyes peeled for fields along the sides of the road. “Bat Town Road,” she read off a street sign as Henry slowed for a stop sign. “Heads up, I’m moving.”

Gansey and Henry laughed, and she felt Gansey’s hand nudge into hers in the space between the passenger seat and the door. She squeezed, and he squeezed back, and then Henry took a turn and let the Pig judder to a stop along the shoulder, the rough asphalt edging up against a field that was brown and crisp with summer, its grass shaggy and stale, but blissfully, wonderfully empty of people.

Henry turned down Bonnie Tyler as she wailed from the stereo. “Will this do?” he asked, his dark eyes hopeful, and Blue nodded vigorously.

“It’s perfect.”

“Bad news,” said Henry once they were out of the car, squinting at his phone through his pineapple sunglasses. “We accidentally drove out of Crab Orchard proper, but the _good_ news is that we’re in Rockwood, which is considered part of Greater Crab Orchard according to Google, and the _auspicious_ news is that it would seem we have landed on Pig Path Road.”

Gansey grinned, and it was so infectious that Blue could hardly be bothered by their change in location. “That _does_ seem auspicious.”

According to Gansey’s watch, which he’d been painstakingly resetting each time they crossed into a new time zone, they still had some time before the eclipse, and he used up a good ten minutes pacing circles in front of the Camaro, stretching his legs, as Henry and Blue perched on the hood and passed the half-gallon of iced tea they’d grabbed from the gas station back and forth.

“Did you know,” said Gansey, casually stretching his arms above his head as if preparing to distribute a casual Gansey Fact, “that the longest recorded eclipse to date was in 743 BC? It lasted for seven minutes and twenty-eight seconds.”

“Dang,” said Henry. “They must have thought the world was ending.”

“Can you imagine?” said Blue, eyes trained on the soft slip of stomach visible where Gansey’s butter-yellow polo had pulled up with his arms. “That’s gotta feel like a sign of the End Times.”

Henry smacked a kiss against her temple. “I think you’re experiencing your own End Times over there, hmm?” He passed her the iced tea. “Sate your thirst, my dear.”

She took a long slug, only half-listening as Gansey continued about historical eclipses. Henry was paying attention, whetting him with questions Blue was sure he’d know the answers to. She liked listening to Gansey’s tangents, his enthusiasm endearing and infectious, but at the moment she was preoccupied with the way his shirt pulled across his shoulders, how tan his skin looked against the pastel fabric. His hair was mussed from the breeze through the car windows, his thighs and calves thick and strong from months of hiking on the weekends. As he paced away from them, she watched the way his shorts pulled against his backside, which had also benefited from months of hiking, and she bit down hard on her lower lip.

On Gansey’s next turn around, Henry shot Blue a look that told her he was falling prey to the same phenomenon, and she took his hand to anchor them both.

“It’s a little stupid how good he looks sometimes, isn’t it?” Henry asked in her ear, and Blue lay her head against his bony shoulder and nodded fervently.

“Incredibly stupid,” she agreed. “Even worse that he manages to do it in those terrible boat shoes.”

Gansey ambled back toward them and took a long slug of iced tea, and Blue watched the movement of his throat as he swallowed. “What now?” he asked, passing the jug back to Henry, and Blue shook her head, catching his jaw in her hand.

“We like you,” she said, kissing the tip of his chin. “In case you were wondering.”

His smile unfurled, languid and sweet, and he kissed her cheek, then Henry’s. “Always good to hear again.”

They lugged the beach blankets Blue had packed deeper into the field and lay them out, overlapping two so they could all lie together. Gansey doused the two of them, and then himself, in bug repellant, swatting at the wispy necks of dead grass whenever they tickled at his calves. Tucking herself between Gansey and Henry, Blue perched her glasses atop her head, wiped a flurry of stray glitter on Henry’s bare arm, and readied her pinhole camera in her lap. She lifted her camera and tilted her face back to watch the moon creep over the tremendous crescent of the sun, then, after a moment, lowered the camera and slid her glasses on. The sun through the lenses, she thought, exhilarated, was the same brilliant shade of orange as the Camaro.

She felt herself grab onto both of them, a thin handful of Henry’s tank top and a thick one of Gansey’s side, as the air began to darken. She slipped her glasses off as the moon and sun moved into totality, sunlight flaring into corona like fabric rippling across the sky, and drank in the sight with all her being. Somewhere around them, cicadas began to sing raspily, and Blue sank into the darkness, eyes only for the billows of light streaming above her, her chest caught between tight and unspooling like every emotion she’d ever felt had been distilled into waves of light and compressed into these two minutes.

She wrapped an arm around each of her boys, Henry lithe and firm, Gansey soft and yielding, and pulled them as close as she could. Her cheeks were damp, she realized, and she took shallow, jagged, joyful breaths, head thrown back as far as she could manage, until Gansey reached over and bumped her glasses back down her nose.

She pressed her cheek to his and found that his was wet, too. “Wow,” he said softly, and she nodded.

“I love it,” she whispered, reverent. “I was afraid it wouldn’t be magical after everything else, but … _wow_.”

He pressed a kiss to her hair. “Me too.”

Beside them, Henry had slumped all the way onto his back. “I’m in shock. I’m flabbergasted. I’m head over heels.” He paused to take a breath. “Do you think the moon would want to marry me?”

Blue settled onto her side, and Gansey eased down next to her. “Can we share her?” she asked Henry, settling her head on his chest. She felt Gansey roll onto his side too, his stomach filling the curve of her back, and he lay an arm over her waist. Henry laced his fingers with Gansey’s, and Blue could feel the inharmonious, uneven sounds of their breathing braided together, the wild, jubilant cadence of people who had witnessed spectacular things and were relieved to find that they had not lost the capability to be awed by other spectacular things.

They lay in silence for a while as the afternoon washed back into the sky, and as Blue moved to sit up, Henry, glasses still firmly in place over his eyes, said, “Wait, stay there, stay there. We have not taken an eclipse picture yet and I refuse to deny my legions of Instagram followers any longer.”

He held his phone above them, and Blue scrunched up her face in a goofy smile as Gansey crowded his face next to hers. Once the shutter sounded, Gansey dropped a kiss on her neck, and she turned over to press a kiss into the dimple in his cheek.

They packed up, Gansey installing himself behind the wheel this time as Henry spread out in the back and Blue resumed her recline between the passenger seat and the dashboard. Her phone pinged, and she glanced at it to find Henry’s Instagram tag and a couple of pictures from Adam in their group text with Gansey.

 **officialhenrycheng** _IT DOESN’T GET MUCH BETTER THAN TRAVELING WITH MY SUN AND STARS, BUT TODAY WE ALSO SAW MY WIFE, THE MOON, AND SHE WAS LOVELY_

 **Text from Plant Boy Parrish:** _hope yall got to see something a little nicer than this. it was cool though. ronan didn’t look into the sun_

 **Text from Plant Boy Parrish:** _not for too long at least_

Attached were three pictures: a dapple of sunlit crescents and shadows against a sidewalk lush with overgrown grass; a tiny scythe of light caught on the back of Adam’s hand; and finally, Adam squinting into the front-facing camera of his phone, the eclipse barely visible behind him in a blaze of white. All three, Blue thought, were a very different kind of exquisite than the eclipse she had witnessed.

“Magnificent,” said Gansey when she showed him at a stoplight, breaking into a dazzled sort of grin. “Tell him he’s just as wonderful as the eclipse.”

Blue obliged.

 **Text from Plant Boy Parrish:** _gansey you already have a girlfriend and a boyfriend_

Blue read it aloud. “So I do,” said Gansey grandly. “But that doesn’t mean we need to pretend that Adam is anything less than magnificent.”

“I’m transcribing that verbatim,” said Blue, poking at her keyboard, “because it’s true.”

\--

For as wild and charged as the eclipse had made her feel, Blue dozed off for the better part of an hour, and when she woke, she found the Pig racing down a highway that cut through what appeared to be thousands upon thousands of acres of mountains and trees, the air sweet and spiny with it. _Of course_ , she thought, a sleepy smile tugging at her mouth. _I wouldn’t let myself sleep through this_.

“Where are we?” she asked, turning to Gansey. He smiled soft and slow, reached over, and touched her hair, and when she glanced at it in the rearview, she saw that it was flat on that side from sleeping on it.

“Interstate 26 cuts through the Cherokee National Forest,” he said. “We thought you’d like that.”

Henry appeared in her periphery, and she turned to peck him on the cheek. “Thank you.”

“Of course, Blue Spruce.” He braced himself on the passenger seat with one arm and held his phone out to her. “Four hours left until we make land in Henrietta, if Google Maps is anything to go by. Your turn to choose the music?”

“Sure is,” she said, and they constructed a collaborative We’re Almost Home playlist over the center console, murmuring clannishly back and forth as Gansey gamely hummed to himself what sounded suspiciously like one of Henry’s favorite songs off of _Emotion Side B_ over the static on the radio. Blue put it on the playlist.

Gansey couldn't carry a tune, but over the past five years he’d learned the words to most, if not all, of Blue’s and Henry’s most-played songs. It was only sometime in college when he'd begun to sing along instead of humming while they drove, with an abandon that made Blue’s chest hurt a little if she thought about it too long. He had picked her up from the airport when she'd returned from the final leg of the semester she'd spent in South America, tracking migratory patterns of the pygmy tyrant. He and Henry had met her in Venezuela on their spring breaks - with a certain degree of delight at the way fate had seen fit to unite them exactly as they’d planned back in high school - but the last two months of her time abroad had ground down harder on Gansey. She could see it in the bags beneath his eyes, sense it in the weariness under the enormous smile he'd greeted her with, feel it in the way her shoulder grew damp beneath his cheeks when he'd hugged her. He’d let her pick the music on the drive back to Henrietta, as he always did, and when the opening notes of “Use It” burst from the speakers, she’d turned it up, and to her surprise, he’d belted the lyrics out with her, loud and joyful and reckless, and her heart had broken and resewn itself for him.

 _You had to send a wrecking crew after me!_ he’d sung, gloriously tuneless, and she’d thought of how, when she’d met him, he’d been a careful study in emotional tidiness, in taking care to conduct himself in a manner that left no room for being wrecked or wrecking.

She hit play on her phone, and the opening chords of one of Henry’s favorite K-pop songs blasted through the car. Henry had learned all the words for an Aglionby talent show years before, but Blue and Gansey had become experts at mimicking the sounds of the lyrics, and Blue and Henry danced along from their seats as Gansey sped along the highway. Henry had taught them both the choreography from the music video in a hotel room in Provincetown while they waited out a hurricane warning, and only he and Blue remembered most of it, four years later, although they'd adapted it so that it was easier to do while sitting in a car.

In honor of their imminent reunion, she also snuck some of Ronan’s favorite Shitbox Sing-along tunes onto the playlist as well, and Gansey groaned dramatically when the Murder Squash song thundered on. Blue and Henry turned to each other and cheered, hands held out to the other. Stuck in two hours’ traffic trying to avoid LA, they'd developed a clapping game to the rhythm of the song, and it was the closest Blue had ever seen Gansey to committing murder.

Now, he just shook his head, long-suffering, and reached over to card his fingers through the back of her hair, trailing down to where she'd had Henry shave the underside two weeks ago when the weather in New Orleans had crested to a hundred and two degrees.

She leaned to kiss the inside of Gansey's bicep, lips brushing the tattoo tucked there. The old Welsh word for _remembered_ was inked on the inside of his arm in his hurried but deliberate scrawl, so that when his arm rested against his side, it was barely visible if you didn't know to look. He and Malory had spent months painstakingly searching for a translation that was accurate to Glendower’s time. Blue’s tattoo was along her ribs, in loopy letters that she’d designed to look as though they had many sorts of flowers growing out of them. Ronan’s was in Latin, block letters that curled into the tattoo that mapped over his back and shoulders, an endnote that still rang into silence, and Adam’s was stamped in the tiniest letters Blue had ever seen, tucked behind his deaf ear.

She lifted her phone and took a Snapchat video of the endless rush of trees streaming past her window and slid a Tennessee geofilter on it before sending it to Adam. A moment later, Adam sent a Snap back: Ronan, wearing only waders, waist-deep in the pond beyond the Barns, shielding his face with a middle finger, captioned _the only ten I see._ A second Snap followed a minute later: Opal crawling on Ronan’s back, pulling one of his fingers into her mouth: _she doesn't understand swimming._

Blue laughed, delighted, and even as the song changed to “Despacito” - usually an open invitation for Henry to commit a passionate affront to the Spanish language, Blue to hit him with whatever hard object was closest, and Gansey to make a sheepish argument over their noise that despite Blue’s misgivings, the song _was quite an earworm_ \- she kept smiling, as the Faux Pig carried them deeper into the forest, into her heart.

\--

Gansey let out a whoop as they turned off the highway onto the exit for Singer’s Falls, and Blue took a deep breath of the wet, heavy air, thick with the smells of red dirt and deciduous brush. Gansey’s free hand crept across the center console and clung to hers, and she felt like Henrietta had turned up its color, its volume, like it had sensed her return and made itself into a little something more for her.

The Barns looked as lush as ever when they rolled up the dirt path, and a couple of spotted brown cows meandered along the sides of the driveway. Blue peeled herself from the vinyl seat and stopped to pet one’s nose, while Gansey gave its flank a cautious pat and Henry hung back altogether.

“That one kicks, Maggot!” came Ronan’s voice, and Blue and Gansey whirled in a motion almost as well-choreographed as Henry’s K-pop routine.

“Lynch!” shouted Gansey, and Ronan leapt down the front steps to crush him in a hug so joyfully violent that it knocked his wireframes askew.

Adam was fast on his heels, clattering out of the house with Opal piggybacked on his hips. Opal had not appeared to age over the course of the past five years, nor had she lost any of the charming and profoundly unnerving oddness that came of being born from Ronan’s dreams. She still wore his wristwatch, riddled with bite marks, but this summer had seen the addition of a very large straw hat jammed over her wispy blond hair. A pair of obnoxiously reflective chrome sunglasses were perched on her nose, and Blue had absolutely zero doubts about who she'd pinched them from.

Adam let her climb from his back to Ronan’s, and once his arms were free, he stepped into Blue’s embrace. He was, Blue thought, even taller than when she'd seen him for his graduation from MIT in May. She held him tight, arms snug around his slim waist. He was a little looser against her than he used to be - she wondered if it was a side effect of receiving so much more physical affection than he had five years ago.

“Did you like the eclipse?” he asked once they'd broken apart, ruffling a hand through his hair as the breeze toyed with it. “It wasn't much here, but it was still neat.”

She nodded vigorously. “It was perfect. Everything went dark and then the light unfurled and it was--” She shook her head. “It was everything I wanted it to be.”

“Good,” he said. “Where did you stop to see it?”

“Scenic Crab Orchard, Tennessee,” she said, and she felt roots spread in her heart when he broke into a smile, the corners of his brown eyes crinkling.

“Sounds like just the place,” he said, and then he vanished into the enormous hug Gansey wrapped him in. Blue giggled, and turned to bump her fist against Ronan’s.

Ronan thunked Opal to the ground, and she pawed at his leather bracelets for a moment before picking her way over to Henry and crouching down to examine his gold sneakers, murmuring to herself in Latin.

“Hiya,” said Henry, tapping the brim of her hat. “We should have gotten you some cowboy boots.”

Opal straightened, and Henry held out his hands to her the same way he did when he wanted to begin a clapping game with Blue. Opal held up her hands, mirroring, and Henry gently touched his hands to hers. Opal watched, fascinated, and Blue’s heart swelled.

Ronan ran his hand over the shorn part of Blue’s head and nodded approvingly. “Sick haircut, Sargent. You should've done Dick’s while you were at it. Shaved in a Batman symbol or something.”

“Believe me,” said Blue, as Gansey, pulling away from Adam just slightly, furrowed his brow. “I offered.”

“Such a glorious head of hair, though,” said Henry gallantly, sidling up to Gansey’s other side to slide an arm around his waist and pet the thick, soft swoop of his hair over his forehead. “It would be a shame to deprive the world of its grandeur.”

Ronan cut a look at Henry. “One-eight hundred _did I ask_ , Cheng,” he said, but it was the same gruff, affectionate tone he'd adopted for Blue when they first became friends, and she never grew tired of the way it made Henry beam.

She watched as Adam and Henry gave each other acknowledging nods from either side of Gansey, and Adam slid off to bump up against Ronan. “You weren’t subjected to Gansey’s yacht rock for all two months, were you?” he asked, peering around Ronan to Henry, and Blue watched the subtle hand of relief smooth the tension from Henry’s jaw. After five years, she knew he still had a hard time reading Adam, and he was visibly pleased every time Adam chose to interact with him.

“Heavens, no,” said Henry, laying the back of his hand against his forehead as if the very thought made him faint. “Please rest assured that Bluebird and I took great pains to scrub all traces of yacht rock from this journey.”

“Except for ‘Africa,’” said Blue, over Gansey’s protests. “And most of the Fleetwood Mac.”

“I was going to defend Fleetwood Mac, at least,” Gansey grumbled, and Henry thumbed at his soft hip and laid a loud kiss on his cheek.

“Don’t worry, Ganseyboy. You are very smart, and very pretty, and we love you, and we are slowly improving your musical tastes.”

Adam shook his head, a soft smile turning up the corners of his mouth. He turned back to Blue and touched the shoulder of her top. “Did that shirt start life as one of Gansey’s polos? It's that weird polo fabric.”

She nodded, pleased that he'd noticed. She’d cut the collar off so just the buttons and v-neck remained, trimmed the hems off the sleeves a bit unevenly, and sliced it into a crop top that hit just a few inches below her bralette. “It was getting too short for him, so I altered it.”

“Doesn’t she wear that color splendidly?” Gansey asked, leaning his head on Henry’s shoulder, one hand dangling into Opal’s as she studied his purple fingernails. “I would give up every orange thing I own to see Jane wear it instead.”

“Maggot,” said Ronan, “you better expand this DIY shit to every color of the goddamn rainbow.”

“What, so he’ll be shirtless?” said Adam, raising an eyebrow, and Henry guffawed. Adam allowed him a small smile, and Blue watched Henry beam.

“ _No_ ,” Ronan growled, “so he’ll finally get rid of all those ugly-ass golf shirts,” and Gansey, his delight at being back in their company bleedingly obvious through his delicately put-upon look, shook his head.

“Always trying to get me shirtless, aren’t you, Lynch?”

Ronan grumbled, and Adam covered Ronan’s face with one hand, and Ronan squirmed until he’d gotten an arm around Adam’s neck in what appeared to be an excruciatingly gentle headlock.

“Blue,” Adam said, over the sounds of Ronan’s grousing, “we made you something. I know you don’t like birthday stuff but since you were already celebrating, and we were going to see you, we figured …”

“You’re forgiven,” she said, grinning, and she let Adam and Ronan lead the troupe of them into the house. She perched on one of the kitchen barstools, Gansey on the one beside her. Henry leaned on the counter, balancing on his elbows, and she watched Ronan visibly restrain the urge to knock them out from under him.

“Close your eyes,” said Ronan, and Blue glanced at him warily.

“Is it alive?”

“Not the way you think,” said Adam, coming up behind her. “Not the part you’re going to be holding, anyway.”

Gansey laughed at her bemused expression, and she reached over to poke his stomach. He made a little sound of mock betrayal and scooted back on his stool.

“Close your eyes,” Ronan repeated, disappearing somewhere behind her. “Put out your hands.”

“Ronan, I swear to God,” she said, but she closed her eyes and put out her hands.

She was surprised by the heft of it, the way her hands dipped under its weight. It felt boxy, wooden maybe, and she tapped her fingertips at the sides of it, finding corners and edges, until a moment later, Ronan said, “Okay, open already, Jesus.”

She opened her eyes, and the air went out of her lungs. In her hands was a smallish terrarium, built from the same grainy, vaguely ancient-looking wood as Ronan’s puzzle box, and wrapped around with letters in the language of the _tir e e’lintes_. It was overflowing with plants that looked just a little stranger than Blue had seen before: echeveria with petals that curled up like cupped hands; cacti with tiny, improbable flowers perched at the end of each spine; translucent strings-of-pearls that crept over one side of the box; perforata that looped into perfect circles instead of reaching straight up; haworthias that appeared to have some sort of feelers on their leaves; jelly bean sedum that were so gently spiky that they reminded her of the rubber earrings she had worn obsessively in middle school. The whole family of plants swayed gently, as if underwater, and each one was a different bright, neon shade that Blue was positive did not occur in nature.

She brushed one of the chartreuse strings-of-pearls, and it looped around her finger gently. “ _Ronan_ ,” she said softly. “I love it.”

“Parrish helped,” said Ronan gruffly. “He picked the plants, I just improved them.”

“I love it,” she said again, bringing it closer to her face to study the tiny flowers at the end of the cactus spines. One of the haworthia fronds rubbed against her cheek like a kitten, and she giggled.

“It’ll live anywhere,” Ronan said, bracing an elbow on Adam’s shoulder and leaning on him. “Doesn’t need light, doesn’t need water. It also won’t die. Figured if you’re going to be chasing birds and shit around the globe you should have something to take with you.”

“Thank you.” She ran her fingers over the letters etched into the wood. “What does it say?”

Adam rolled his eyes and shifted so that his elbow was resting on Ronan’s shoulder instead. “It says _Fuck you, I’m magic_ , because Ronan is the goddamn worst.”

Blue laughed, and Gansey laughed, and Henry laughed, and Opal, who had followed them in, gave the high, kicking noise that passed for her own laughter. Blue set the terrarium onto the counter, and fought the urge to make a terribly affectionate sound as Gansey, leaning in curiously, had his face caressed by the lilac haworthia as well.

Henry stroked a petal of a turquoise echeveria with the side of his thumb, then touched the tiny orange flower of a magenta cactus. Blue saw it lean into his touch. “Truly a day for wonders,” he said softly, and Blue caught his eye to share a smile.

Then she lunged for Ronan and caught him in a hug before he could dodge, and she heard Adam and Gansey’s laughter tangle up behind her, and she grinned as fiercely as she could into Ronan’s grubby black tank top.

“Thank you, asshole,” she said against him. “It’s perfect.”

She felt him shrug, but when she stepped away, he’d cracked a smile. “You only turn twenty-three once, right? God, at least I hope you do.”

“I heard nobody likes me now, or something?” she said as she pulled away from hugging Adam, and she watched Ronan realize at the same moment she did why the line was familiar: it had been one of the shitty Blink-182 classics Noah had sung incessantly in the backs of cars, under his breath, while rattling around Monmouth Manufacturing.

She heard Gansey’s inhale, Adam’s small _mm_ , and she swallowed hard. Ronan scrubbed a hand over the back of his skull, his palm running into the curls he’d been letting reemerge at the top of his head. His fingernails, black and chipping, caught her eye; she barely noticed them day to day anymore, but she remembered now, sharp as anything, that he’d only begun painting them after Noah’s passing-on, his own silent tribute.

She heard Henry rustle behind her, uneasy in their silence, and she slid a hand across the counter so he could still feel like he was at least a little part of this.

“Well,” Gansey began after a moment, but he trailed off with a yelp as Chainsaw sailed through the open window behind him, unnervingly close to his face.

“ _Jesus_ ,” he redirected himself, and perhaps the spell over them didn’t break entirely, but it shattered enough for them to laugh, exhale, relax a little.

“ _Kerah_ ,” said Chainsaw, settling herself on Ronan’s shoulder. Adam extended a hand to her and she indulged him a few gentle pecks at his fingers.

“Maybe if you let your hair grow out again, she can start nesting in it,” said Gansey. “You can become one compound entity.”

“We’re already one compound entity,” said Ronan, but some of the tension dropped from his shoulders. “All three of us. Adam’s my super-ego and Chainsaw’s my id.”

Gansey snorted. “If that were true, Adam would have stopped you from doing one hundred percent more stupid things than he historically has.”

Even Henry laughed at that, and Blue felt the spell break all the way this time. She squeezed Henry’s hand again, and then turned to grip Gansey’s shoulder. He tilted his head toward her, a soft smile blooming. She touched a fingertip against his lips, and allowed herself a single moment of sap before Ronan made a sound in the back of his throat like Chainsaw horking down a hot dog.

“You just spent two goddamn months in a car with him, give me a fucking break.”

He punctuated this by laying a loud, elaborate kiss on Adam until Adam began to blush so furiously that Blue thought he might combust, and then Ronan pulled back and stretched his arms behind his head as casually as if he’d done nothing at all.  

“You wanna come out back? We finished building a new fire pit last week. It was so suburban dad that I had Adam check me over to make sure I hadn’t turned into Gansey.”

That pleasantly miffed expression returned to Gansey’s features, and he slid an arm around Blue as she moved toward him, leaving his other arm open for Henry. “I’ll have you know,” he said as they traipsed outside, “that being an amateur suburban dad is a very respectable profession, and I will not hear it dishonored this way.”

The evening was clear and cooling, the damp air a blanket around Blue’s shoulders. Ronan had let loose a handful of his dreamed-up bugless lightning bugs, and the darker it grew around them, the more luminous they became. She watched the firelight throw angles on Adam and Ronan’s faces across the pit, where they sat tangled on a beach blanket, and then closed her eyes and let the warmth wash over her tired skin as night fell more and more deeply.

She took a deep breath, exhaled. She felt the pull back to Fox Way like one of the knotted ropes she and Gansey and Henry had used to explore caves in New Mexico, like she could follow it hand over hand until it led her, breathless, exhilarated, back to where she'd begun. For as much as she loved the excitement and uncertainty of road trips, she longed for the everyday clamor of her home, the joyful, bustling mundanity inside its strangeness.

She'd cleared with Maura a few days beforehand, planning their grand return, that Gansey and Henry could stay the night after driving all day. They hardly needed an invitation anymore, but Gansey was funny about showing up unannounced on occasions when _showing up_ also involved occupying real estate in Blue’s bed. Blue had done a loud and thorough job of making sure Fox Way’s multitudes knew that she was Absolutely Not sleeping with either Gansey or Henry, to the point that she sometimes worried that she had protested too much and convinced the entire house that she was _definitely_ sleeping with both of them. Henry, for his part, spoke freely enough about his asexuality that she figured maybe some of her relatives had at least figured she wasn’t sleeping with _him_. Gansey’s asexuality was a different, quieter animal, such an afterthought to him that he barely seemed to remember that it wasn’t the norm - he tended to forget that sex was something other people devoted mental airtime to. The first time he’d spent the night, Orla had greeted him and Blue the next morning with a sly smile and a slick innuendo, and Gansey had stared at her with such confusion and poorly masked horror that she had thrown up her hands in disgust and left them alone.

Once the fire dulled to embers, she and Henry and Gansey hit the road, with plans in place to go hiking with Adam and Ronan and Opal the next day. She settled into the passenger seat in the dim of the streetlights, her terrarium cradled in her lap, Gansey’s hand resting in hers near the shift. In the backseat, she could hear Henry falling asleep.

She closed her eyes, the familiar sound of the Pig along Henrietta’s neglected roads thrilling in its comfort. She felt as if she had been awake for several continuous, wonderful days instead of just one. She had witnessed a total solar eclipse with two of the people she loved most, and she was at the end of her second cross-country road trip, and half of her boys had driven her through a national forest because they knew she’d like it, and the other half had dreamed her a magic terrarium, and in no time at all she would hug Maura and Calla and her aunts and cousins and she would eat Maura’s sludgy brownies, and she would spend her first night being twenty-three tangled in Gansey and Henry as she had in more than half of the fifty states, as she had in Venezuela and in hotel beds and dorm beds and strangers’ AirBnB beds, as she secretly hoped she might forever, the rhythms of their lungs indiscernible from, or maybe in harmony with, her own.

She heard the jump of Henry’s breathing as he woke with the turn onto Fox Way. Gansey’s fingers tightened around hers as the little blue house crept into her vision, and she smiled, smiled, smiled, her heart cracked wide open, waiting.


End file.
